Columbus' school attendance falls with 'unscrubbed' data

Sunday

Sep 8, 2013 at 12:01 AMSep 8, 2013 at 4:23 PM

At Walnut Ridge High School last year, students missed nearly one of every five days during the school year, on average. This is the reality. The previous school years' attendance rates - averaging about 91 percent - now seem more like fiction.

Jennifer Smith Richards, The Columbus Dispatch

At Walnut Ridge High School last year, students missed nearly one of every five days during the school year, on average. This is the reality. The previous school years’ attendance rates — averaging about 91 percent — now seem more like fiction.

Linden-McKinley STEM Academy for years has boasted near-perfect attendance rates. Almost every student was in class every day, according to the attendance data the school reported to the state. But the reality is more sobering, if last school year’s attendance rates are accurate: On average, Linden-McKinley students missed 13 percent of the school year. That’s the equivalent of missing more than a month of school.

The new rates that were released late last month with Ohio’s school report cards show attendance at Independence, Marion-Franklin, Mifflin, Whetstone and West high schools also went from outstanding to mediocre.

It is a first look at attendance in Columbus City Schools since the district ended its practice of withdrawing and then re-enrolling students who had been absent a lot. That practice, called “ scrubbing,” allowed the district to exclude those students’ attendance and test-score data from its report cards because they hadn’t technically been enrolled for the full school year.

It also is the first data submitted since the district has been under investigation by state Auditor Dave Yost and the FBI. Yost began investigating student-data manipulation in the district in the summer of 2012 after the schools had sent data to the state for the 2011-12 school year. Yost’s team still is investigating, but has already determined that the district manipulated student data. Yost has said he’ll refer some employees for criminal prosecution.

The schools — all high schools — that district computer logs show deleted the most absences in recent years also recorded the largest declines in attendance.

District officials say they can’t explain whether the end of scrubbing led to the lower attendance rates.

“There are a lot of pieces to this data, and much more careful analysis is needed in order to draw conclusions about cause and effect,” district spokeswoman Jacqueline Bryant wrote in an emailed statement. She stressed that the district is working hard to address students’ attendance issues, including working one-on-one with students to understand the reasons for their absenteeism and making personalized plans to help.

Yost said the lower rates are no surprise.“That’s consistent with all of the evidence that we’ve seen. Obviously, once they knew somebody was looking, they changed their practices,” he said.That the rates dropped more dramatically in some schools than in others also jibes with the investigation’s findings, Yost said.“Some scrubbed, some didn’t,” he said.

“Some scrubbed a lot and some scrubbed a lot less.

“What this tells me also is that the district is beginning to turn a corner. These (new) numbers are cause for hope.”

As a whole, the district went from an attendance rate of nearly 95 percent to92.5 percent. Two-thirds of its 115 schools have lower rates than they did for the 2011-12 school year.

The Ohio Department of Education “cannot speculate as to why any school’s or district’s attendance rates may have increased or decreased,” spokesman John Charlton said last week.

The district has said that it regularly withdrew students who had been absent 10 straight days without an excuse. Over the 14-month-long state auditor investigation, the district never has provided documents that reference such a policy or even allude to its existence; it seems to have been unofficial.

District officials — everyone from the former superintendent to district lawyers to school-board members — never have said the practice was wrong or admitted that student information has been manipulated. They have argued that the state rules that dictate when students can be withdrawn are fuzzy and that it’s likely employees made honest mistakes.

Yost has called that bunk.

Some of the other eight Ohio school districts that Yost found to have “scrubbed” students have argued that, too. The other districts considered “scrubbers” are Canton, Campbell in Mahoning County, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Marion, Northridge in Montgomery County and Winton Woods in Hamilton County.

Nevertheless, attendance rates in all but one of those districts, Cincinnati, went down last school year, too.

The Cleveland school district, which two years ago had an attendance rate of 92.2 percent, dropped to 89 percent. Cleveland withdrew students who had been absent for five straight days without an excuse. The district has said it ended its use of the five-day rule and school-level employees no longer are allowed to withdraw students.